07/11/2014

Holman Team Wins 2014 R&D 100 Award

Source:Dan Hawkes

As announced earlier this month (July 2014) by R&D Magazine, ESD’s Hoi-Ying Holman and her team of scientists (including ESD’s Liang Chen and Giovanni Birarda, as well as former ESD postdoc Sun Choi) have won a 2014 R&D 100 award, for the Berkeley Lab Multiplex Chemotyping Microarray (MCM). The MCM was one of three 2014 LBNL winners of this coveted award, given annually by R&D Magazine to, in their own words, “identify and celebrate the top technology products of the year… [spanning] industry, academia, and government-sponsored research.”

Applicable to many different fields of scientific research, the MCM generates collections of microscopic biomolecule or particle assemblies accurately and reproducibly. It enables rapid chemical analyses of prospective biofuel plants and microbial communities, by combining high-throughput micro-contact printing technology with high-fidelity spectroscopic and spectrometric techniques.

In biofuel applications, the MCM is allowing researchers to begin determining how specific genes control cell-wall composition. In microbial community screening research, it has enabled unprecedented nondestructive chemical fingerprinting of the microbial community. In medical research, its rapid identification of the deep structure of fibrous protein aggregates (that potentially enhance HIV infectivity) have made it an essential part of the overall strategy for neutralizing the HIV infection. In short, the MCM, wherever it has been applied, has achieved a never-before-realized fundamental, chemical, molecular understanding of the scientific challenge being confronted.

The R&D 100 Banquet and Awards Presentation honoring Holman, her team, and other 2014 winners will take place at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas on Friday, November 7, 2014.

The MCM is the fifth ESD R&D 100 winner in the past eight years—an extraordinary level of technological innovation and achievement by any scientific organization over the last decade. MCM joins the Carbon Explorer (Jim Bishop, 2006), the Berkeley Unexploded Ordnance Discriminator (Erika Gasperikova, 2007), the PhyloChip (Gary Andersen, 2008), and the EM Geo Electromagnetic Geological Mapper (Greg Newman, 2009)—as a winner of this award.

The MCM microarray device (right) compared to a home printing machine (concept art—to scale). Its compact design makes it a perfect bench-top instrument for any analytical application.

Congratulations, Hoi-Ying, Liang, Giovanni, and Sun!

For a press release on this technology provided by LBNL’s Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Management Office, go to: